Christian Ethics / Human Rights
"Finn's lucid accounts of social structures, markets, and power enables him to identify the moral responsibilities that consumers have for sinful social structures. Consumer Ethics in a Global Economy is required reading for the Christian ethicist."
- Daniel J. Daly, Associate Professor, Boston College School of Theology and Ministry
"Finn's work again fills an important gap in Christian ethics, this time by carefully developing an accessible and compelling account of how markets place consumers into morally significant relationships with distant producers. Through its use of critical realism and concrete examples, this volume not only promises to clarify a number of ongoing debates within economic ethics, but also proposes a usefully fine-grained analysis of how moral agency is itself shaped by social structures such as markets."
- Christina McRorie, Assistant Professor of Theology, Creighton University
Does buying a shirt at the local department store create for you some responsibility for the horrendous death in a factory fire of the women who sewed it half a planet away? Or for the less severe injustices, such s the withholding of wages, the denial of bathroom breaks, and forced overtime? Many people interested in justice have claimed so but without identifying any causal link between consumer and producer, for the simple reason that no single consumer has any perceptible effect on any of the producers.
Finn uses a critical realist understanding of social structures to view both the positive and negative effects of the market as a social structure comprising a long chain of causal relations from consumer / clerk to factory manager / seamstress. This causal connection creates a consequent moral responsibility for consumers (along with many others) for the destructive effects that markets help to create.
Daniel K. Finn is an economist and theologian, teaching at St. John's University and the College of St. Benedict in Minnesota. He is a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA), the Society of Christian Ethics (SCE), and the Association for Social Economics (ASE). He has published extensively on the relation of ethics and economics. He is director of the True Wealth of Nations research project at the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies in Los Angeles.
